Strategic Research Centre for Recognition in the Immune System (IRIS)
- Reference number
- A3 02:096
- Start and end dates
- 030101-101231
- Amount granted
- 52 000 000 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Karolinska Institutet
- Research area
- Life Sciences
Summary
The cells and receptors of the immune system communicate to make decisions ultimately influencing health versus disease, or even life versus death, in a variety of medical conditions and treatments. The vision behind this centre is to understand complex recognition and regulation in immune and inflammatory cells, influenced by multiple receptors, determined by gene and protein expression but also at a level beyond proteomics, at the level of intracellular distribution and membrane topology of receptors. Such a “systems biology” approach, based on the notion that “life is more than a sum of molecules”, will allow a better understanding of several cell types in the immune system but also of non-immune cells or microbes that they interact with as epithelial cells and bacteria. These studies will require a combination of expertise in immunology, structural biology, cell biology, imaging techniques and mathematical modelling and will focus initially on inflammatory signalling in responses in the gastrointestinal tract, involving T-cells as well as epithelial cells